TITLE: What Lurks Beneath
NAME: Geoffrey C. Wedig
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: sporadic@core.com
TOPIC: The Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lurks.jpg
RENDERER USED:
POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED:
Moray, Python, C++
RENDER TIME:
Due to a systems crash, the render was done in two segments.
Parse
time was around 2 hours (due to the rope, see below), and render time
was around 35 hours for previous runs, but this one was more (how much
more is impossible to determine.
HARDWARE USED:
Pentium II, 400 MHZ
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
"'Twas the spring of 1671. We sailed upon the smooth seas
off the eastern coast of Florida for the Carolinas. The sea
was like a mirror, smooth and flat beneath the round of the
moon when it came upon us, and not a man left alive but I
to tell the tale...."
- Jonathan McCormack, 2nd Mate, The Minerva
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This is my first entry to the IRTC, and I did a lot of things wrong.
First, I didn't pick the final image until very late. This meant I
spent a lot of time working on objects which are not visible in the
final image. There is a mermaid on the bow, for example, created using
Blobman and custom code.
I would say the ship is about 50-50 Moray modeling and hand-edited
scripts. The rigging is entirely hand-done using a series of custom
macros for rope that I generated. The knots are actually tied, and the
rope is actual made of twined strands (this isn't visible in the final
image, but many ideas required it. See
http://darwin.cwru.edu/~wedig/ship/cleat.jpg if you're interested in
what it looks like up close)
The sails were simulated using custom C++ code based on Xavier Provot's
work, since I wanted them to look right and my experimentation with
Bezier patches were turning out too smooth and regular.
Water was done using a multi-layered texture at different scale to generate a
height field. This created a variety of sizes in the waves.
The splash was tricky, and I am still not entirely satisfied. It was
generated using the spray include file of Chris Colefax. Anyone who
knows how to get better splashes in POV-Ray, let me know. ;)